Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

‘Oh no,’ the vicar said, ‘physical pressures I can control. He turned his head and stared at the bridge, the church, the roofs of the village. ‘This bloody place!’

Lol suddenly thought of Isabel in the churchyard. Seemed such a nice boring place, it did, after Wales. No historical baggage. No history at all that wasn’t to do with hops. Perfect, it was. And now – blood everywhere .

‘I’m horribly, horribly sensitive, Lol,’ Simon said. ‘That’s my problem. Like people with a skin condition who can’t go out in the sun. Will you tell her that?’

Eirion saw she had other preoccupations and said perhaps he’d take a walk around the village. When he’d gone, Merrily phoned Huw Owen over in the Brecon Beacons.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Wondered if you’d be calling one of these days. We do get the papers up here – not necessarily the same day, mind. Anyroad, say nowt, that’s my advice. When the trial date’s set, we’ll happen have a chat about it.’

‘There won’t be a trial. He hanged himself last night.’

‘Who?’

‘Stock. In his cell at the remand centre.’

‘Simplifies things,’ Huw said.

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘You can get yourself through an inquest. You can tell the coroner why any comparisons with the Taylor case are inappropriate.’

‘No. I mean, yes, all that’s very much on the cards, and I’m really trying not to think about it yet. But to complicate things, informed sources at Knight’s Frome are suggesting there’s a remaining problem.’

‘At this kiln place?’

‘That the killing happened not because Stock was in any way possessed, but because his wife was.’

‘By what?’

‘A gypsy girl went missing, back in the sixties. There’s reason to think she was imprisoned in the kiln and either strangled or choked to death on sulphur, and then her body was burned in the furnace. All I wanted to ask is, have you had any dealings with, or do you know anything about, Romany beliefs?’

‘Specifically?’

‘Specifically, the mulo .’

He didn’t say he had, he didn’t say he hadn’t. ‘How long you got to play with?’

She told him, expecting him to laugh.

He didn’t. ‘Walk away, lass,’ he said. ‘Just take a holiday. There’s no shame in that.’

HER HAIR FELL not much more than shoulder-length but was bushed out, maybe a little frizzy; her nose was hooked, her mouth small but full-lipped. The sleeveless white blouse she wore was knotted under her breasts. She had her hands clasped behind her head, her face upturned. Smiling at the sun – eating the world.

Rebekah.

The black and white photograph was pinned to the wall above a small inglenook in the back room. Eating the world, and then she choked. It broke your heart.

‘That’s not one of Lake’s?’ Merrily asked Al.

‘Mother of God, no, it’s a blow-up of a picture she sent to Tit Bits or Reveille – you remember those old glamour magazines? Looking for a career as a pin-up or a model. It was found after she disappeared. The family had copies made to show around, to see if anyone had seen her. They had to conduct their own search, in the end.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Ah, in those days, as Sally may have said to you, people from ethnic minorities were not considered proper people.’ His eyes were quiet this morning. ‘Even the beautiful ones.’

The back room of the Hop Museum was not open to the public because it also served as a workshop. It ran the length of the main building, and the two shorter walls were lined with racks of hand tools, probably antiques in themselves. There were a pair of elderly wood-lathes and a bench with a Bunsen burner attached to a liquid-gas bottle. Guitar parts – necks, pine tops, bridges – hung from walls and beams. There was a rich composite aroma of glue and resin and wood.

And hops, of course. The scent of hops was unavoidable in this place.

In a white waistcoat and a spotted silk scarf which, Merrily recalled from childhood, was called a diklo , Al had welcomed her with a small bow and a kiss on the hand. Now he was moving around the workshop, picking up guitar fragments and gently putting them down. A sign down by the road had said: MUSEUM CLOSED ALL DAY .

They were still waiting for Simon St John.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Merrily asked Al. ‘I’m afraid I don’t really have as much time as I’d have liked.’ She’d told him as much as she needed to of what had happened after she and Lol had left Knight’s Frome last night. ‘And I’ll need to be there, obviously, when the police come to talk to Jane.’ Al was nodding, but she could tell he was somewhere else.

Jane might sleep for hours yet , Eirion had kept insisting. You go. I can tell this is important. And when she comes down we’ve got a lot to talk about, haven’t we?

At least it wasn’t far; she could be back in just over half an hour, if necessary. If they could hold off the police until this afternoon, that would help. She’d already called Mumford, asked if this was possible. Mumford had said, We’ve found a knife, by the way .

Al was still nodding his goblin chin. ‘By one o’clock, it should be over. By one, we’ll have done all we can do.’

‘But are we trying for the same thing?’

‘To bring her into the light,’ Al said.

‘But is it the same light?’

‘Light is light, drukerimaskri . You know that.’

‘I suppose.’ She didn’t even know if he was a Christian. ‘Where’s Sally?’

‘Gone for a walk. Coming to terms.’

‘How happy is she – about what you’re proposing?’

‘Ah…’ He picked up an unstained guitar neck, only half fretted, held it up to one eye and looked along it. ‘Well, she thinks we should have acted on this when we first suspected something was arising. I tried. I talked to Stock, way back. Told him to sell the place to Lake, take his wife away from here.’

‘Did you?’

‘Ah, but Stock’s patting me on the shoulder, patronizing, like I’m this colourful old rural character. Perhaps I should’ve had more patience with Stock, told him I was Boswell the guitar-maker, but I didn’t want him to know. Consequently, perhaps, I don’t suppose he believed a word I was telling him.’

‘He must have believed something in the end. He went to Simon St John. And then he came to me.’

‘Poor Simon, he doesn’t want to do this, even now. He’s afraid for himself, and for his wife. He’s afraid of what he might bring down on his wife.’

Merrily didn’t quite understand, but it was clear that nobody seemed to be entirely happy about this, perhaps not even Al himself.

‘Then why today?’ she asked him. ‘Why the hurry?’

‘It’s not a hurry for me, drukerimaskri .’ He put down the guitar neck. ‘I’ve had years to prepare.’

‘Why you?’

‘Because I’m the only Romany left. And because it’s always been my responsibility.’

‘Why?’

Al peered around the workshop, as if to record every detail in his mind. As if to hold a memory of it.

‘I think Simon’s here,’ he said.

The address Frannie Bliss had given him proved to be a three-storey Victorian terrace on the main road out of Leominster. Lol parked the Astra half on the pavement, from where he could see the numbers on the front doors.

The man he was looking for lived in the ground-floor flat at the far end of the terrace, but he owned the whole building, Bliss had emphasized, as if this explained something.

Lol sat there for ten minutes, the car slowly turning into a roasting tin around him. He thought about Simon St John, who had once said, This is the country, Lol. In the country, in certain situations, everybody lies . Had Simon himself really been telling the truth this time? Had he genuinely been too scared to attempt to exorcize Stock’s kiln? In which case, why hadn’t he referred it directly to Merrily instead of trying to claim Stock was making it up? Lol concluded that in an irrational situation people acted irrationally. How would Merrily react? Would she help Simon now, despite everything?